To understand the Carpenter’s Boat Shop, you have to know the story of its founders, Bobby and Ruth Ives.
In Maine, there are at least five wooden boatbuilding schools, but the Carpenter’s Boat Shop is different. It was created in 1979 by Bobby and his wife, Ruth, to help people find peace and purpose through boatbuilding. As Bobby describes it, the Carpenter’s Boat Shop teaches boatbuilding while also giving people a chance “to think, to live without fear, to love without reserve, and willingly work for the benefit of others.”
For Bobby, the idea of creating a place for people who were seeking a path in life—spiritual orphans of a sort—was sparked in the 1960s when he was an undergraduate student at Bowdoin College. He’d been orphaned as a teenager and the idea of building something with others appealed to him because he had received so much help from others.
The notion to live and work communally was reinforced in the early 1970s when he was studying for a masters in the history of religion at the University of Edinburgh. Bobby was interested in ecumenical church history and as a Quaker he was inspired by the Quakers. But in Scotland he learned about the Brethren of the Common Life, a Roman Catholic religious community founded in the Netherlands that espoused work, worship, prayer, hospitality and service to others on a daily basis. Bobby thought it made sense to live every day with that type of meaning and purpose. In Scotland, he also met Ruth, who shared his feelings. After marrying in 1973 they set out to find a place where they could live according to those principles.
Back in the States, the born-and-bred Mainers moved to Monhegan Island where Ruth taught in a one-room schoolhouse and Bobby assisted. They arrived on a Thursday, and when the local church’s 92-year-old matriarch learned Bobby had studied religion, she quickly approached him to become their minister. Bobby’s grandmother had become Maine’s first ordained female minister in 1929, his father had been a minister and two brothers were ministers, but Bobby was not interested in the ministry. He explained that to the church elder. She told him to give it a try. That Sunday, Bobby gave his first sermon. As the church elder left the church, she told him, “You’ll do.”
When Ruth’s teaching term ran out after two years, the Iveses set out to execute their shared vision—to build a place where they and others could live and work together, and help people who were in transition and needed a year off from their lives. They bought a house and a barn on a 5-acre property on Louds Island in Muscongus Bay, where they became the only year-round residents. Without a store, a flush toilet or running water on the island, they created “a learning laboratory for life.” They dug a vegetable garden, clammed, made lobster traps and fixed boats.
Bobby knew boats and had grown up sailing. As a 9-year-old he’d built his first boat with his father from an article in Boy’s Life magazine, but on Louds Island he truly learned boatbuilding from a Norwegian immigrant named Edward Salor, who summered there. Salor taught Bobby the tricks of the trade and also became a father figure to him. They only used hand tools. “He would even rip the planks by hand,” Bobby says. Not that they had a choice, because there was no electricity on the island. But even when they later got a table saw, Salor refused to use it. “[Hand tools] are some of the things I learned to appreciate [from him],” Bobby says.
Every Saturday, the Iveses would row the peapod Bobby had built across Muscongus Sound to buy groceries in Round Pond. They would sleep at Ruth’s parents’ place, and on Sunday Bobby would preach at a church in Sheepscot. Then they’d row back to Louds. When the sound was frozen, Ruth would sit on the bow to smash the ice while Bobby rowed. “In two years, we only missed three sermons,” Bobby says.
When the island turned out to be too remote to execute their vision, they bought a small property on the mainland in Bristol with a house, a barn and a garage and set up the Carpenter’s Boat Shop. Bobby, Ruth, their 18-month-old daughter Hilda and Rex, a 16-year-old local boy who’d been abandoned by his father, were the first Boat Shop residents. When Ruth and Bobby took Rex in, he became the shop’s first apprentice. He lived and worked with them until he graduated from high school. Bobby felt Rex would be better served if he got away from the area for a while, so he guided him toward the U.S. Coast Guard. Rex was the first of many to find his way through the Carpenter’s Boat Shop. He would become the boatman for President George H.W. Bush at his estate in Kennebunkport and make the Coast Guard his career.
Within three months there were five apprentices, all of whom lived in the house with the couple and their kids. “Basically, it was a socialist community,” Bobby says. “We shared life in common.” The garage was converted into summer living quarters for Salor and his wife, Edith, so he could teach alongside Bobby. For the next eight years, until old age prevented Edward from doing it anymore, he and Bobby were the only instructors.
The house was too small—the Iveses young kids were sleeping in a closet and a hallway—so in 1980 they turned the barn into a dormitory with five bedrooms and two bathrooms. It would be one of many buildings to be restored or built to grow the Carpenter’s Boat Shop.
Every year, a new batch of apprentices would show up and everybody would work together—growing food, adding more buildings, helping others and building and restoring boats. Whenever a new boat was launched, all the builders would get inside it. “If you build a boat you have to test it,” Bobby says. “If it floats you pass, if it sinks, you fail. It’s the only grade you ever get.”
At first, the apprentices were mostly males, but by 1983 they’d gone co-ed. In 1990 they added a 24- by 40-foot barn that included a guest room upstairs. It served as a non-denominational chapel, a place to dry lumber and to hold public functions like apprentice weddings. The year after, they built a temporary shed for a 32-foot Crocker they were restoring, which eventually became a restoration shop. Years later, when that became too small, they added a new wing for machinery, and subsequently added another extension for boat storage.
There was no tuition to become an apprentice and everything, including food and shelter, was supplied. All the labor between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. was shared, as were the proceeds. For the first 10 or 11 years, 85 percent of the income came from boatbuilding and repair. To earn extra money, everyone was free to take on side work, whether building a boat, a house or a baby cradle. “We were socialists by day,” Bobby says, “and capitalists by night.”
Apprenticeships were never advertised. Word of mouth always brought new arrivals who started at the end of summer and stayed through the end of spring. Classes grew to eight people per year, then 10. They lived simply and communally, built and sold Nutshell prams, Catspaw dinghies, Matinicus peapods and Monhegan skiffs, refit and restored clients’ boats and immersed themselves in a contemplative life.
In 1999, neighbors Bobby and Polly Crook offered to sell their 150-acre farm for well below market value. The Boat Shop teamed up with two local land preservation groups, raised the necessary capital and split the property. The Boat Shop picked up 10 acres and all the buildings, and the land preservation groups gained 140 acres that included 1.5 miles of river frontage.
Once again, the Boat Shop’s residents, with the annual assistance of a Presbyterian church group from Basking Ridge, New Jersey, set to work. They restored the farmhouse and expanded it from three bedrooms to eight. When the barn was beyond fixing, they cleaned it out, took it down, sold the old hickory posts and beams, and hired Amish carpenters to raise a new three-story, post-and beam framework. They finished the barn off themselves and turned it into a boat shop with a library, lofting floor, machine shop and paint room.
In 2006, Ruth passed away from brain cancer, and in 2011 Bobby resigned as director. His replacement, Kim Hoare, had first come to the boat shop in 1985 with the Basking Ridge church youth group. Like Bobby, she had a divinity background that included a master’s degree from Yale University. She threw herself into the work while Bobby returned to his alma mater to become Bowdoin’s first director of religious and spiritual life. Hoare was devoted to the boat shop, but filling Bobby’s shoes was an enormous job. After about seven years she left. While a hiring committee searched for a permanent director, interim directors tried to fill the gap.
In 2021, the board hired Alicia Witham, who came with three decades of maritime, educational and leadership experience. Born and raised in Maine, she had been a manager at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School where she spent hundreds of days a year at sea in the school’s 30-foot pulling boats, rowing, sailing and sleeping out in the open with nine other individuals. She also held a 50-ton master’s license, studied boatbuilding at the Landing School, worked as the manager at the Olympic Circle Sailing Club in Berkeley, California, served as COO at the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend, Washington, and was the director of adult programs and charters for SailMaine in Portland.
Since taking over, Witham has introduced new initiatives. Because the pandemic made face-to-face workshops and lectures difficult, she created a monthly virtual speaker series. All of the Zoom lectures—so far given by a local oyster farmer, an artist, an environmental activist, author and sailor Nigel Calder, and boatbuilders—have brought in an audience from around the country.
Witham has also returned the apprentice program to its longer format. (For a stretch, the Carpenter’s Boat Shop had abandoned Bobby’s 9-month program in favor of two four-month sessions per year.) Classes will now start in the spring and run through the end of the fall.
The summer weather will allow Witham to take the apprentices on two 10-day expedition sailing trips. Those trips will include 3-day island solos, where the apprentices camp alone on an island while fending for themselves. The expedition sailing will give them team-building experience, seamanship skills and boat-handling opportunities. Hurricane Island donated one of its 30-foot sprit-rigged pulling boats and this summer Witham and Program Director Chelsea Fisher will take apprentices out to explore the Maine coast, sleeping aboard the open boat. The solo concept is a feature that Witham knows well from her Outward Bound days. “Three nights on an island gives you the opportunity to be self-reliant,” Witham says. “And leaving cellphones behind while working with peers on a foggy, windless day to move a boat will create opportunities for growth.”
Other new initiatives are an artist-in-residence program, collaborations with the local YMCA and enhanced service in the community, including doing maintenance work with the Maine Island Trail Association. “It’s not just about the apprentice program,” Witham says. “We are so much more than that.” She’s pleased that local residents are coming in to learn how to build boats and to see women in the workshops using the tools. “It’s multigenerational,” she says. “It’s about the connections and about learning together.”
Witham may not have the divinity background of her predecessors, but Chris Leighton, who was a member of the search committee that hired her, praises Witham for bringing new ideas to the boat shop. “Alicia deserves a lot of credit for expanding the scope of the boat shop, especially the increased focus on seamanship. She’s put the boat shop back on an even keel,” he says.
During the fifth week of the 2023 apprentice session, the new apprentices, many of whom have never woodworked, were already well along to completing their first Monhegan skiff. “You can work out a lot of issues sanding,” says Marina Ford. “It’s [like] meditating.” Ford is from Rochester, New York, but she came to the Boat Shop after spending years in Brooklyn, New York, where she worked as a cook, a fish monger and oyster shucker. She found the cost and the psychological aspect of living in a city too much. “I had friends in Portland, and I found the Carpenter’s Boat Shop online randomly,” she says. She doesn’t miss Brooklyn (only the pizza) and she loves living in rural Maine. “The accessibility to the outdoors is shocking in a good way. The days are structured, but I have access to everything.”
Another apprentice, Lily Morgan of Portland, Oregon, was trained as an arborist and came to the Boat Shop because she wanted to work with wood. “I like to collect skillsets and to go out in the world and pull them out when I need them,” she says, “I wasn’t necessarily passionate about boats but it’s growing. To know how wood moves at this stage is interesting.”
In the first weeks of the program, the apprentices had already learned how to build a wooden toolbox and a shaker chair. “I was not handy,” Ford says. “I couldn’t hang up a shelf.” Meanwhile, the apprentices have already restored and refitted boats, fairing, priming and painting. “It’s so interesting to see boats and how they lived at sea,” Morgan says.
Even though it’s been only five weeks, Ford says living communally is already having an impact on the apprentices. “Everybody lives here, so we fix each other’s brains,” she says laughing. “I think it has a lot to do with the environment.”
Apprentice Brian Keuneke had previous experience with boats. He spent the past 8 years as a professional sailor aboard windjammers, but then underwent a life change that required a new direction. “I had a kid,” the 38-year-old says. “I can’t go on wild adventures anymore, so I’m looking for something more stable.” He grew up in Oregon but lived in Washington state, where he sailed tall ships on Puget Sound. He moved to Maine six years ago. “This is a mecca for traditional wooden boats,” he says. “In Washington you got a stipend. In Maine, you sail for profit and there are more opportunities.”
Keuneke’s boating experience is a bonus for the other apprentices. During the daily 10 a.m. tea break he shows the them how to tie bowlines and other knots. He adds that he’s enjoying his Carpenter’s Boat Shop experience. “It’s magical to say the least,” he says. “I’m obsessed with boats. I’m on this gorgeous peninsula, surrounded by beautiful people, and there’s unlimited coffee.”
Apprentices learn how to build boats from the paid instructors, but Bobby also volunteers as a boatbuilding instructor, teaching local residents to build a Matinicus peapod in the restoration shop. The lines for the peapod were taken off the boat that Bobby and Ruth used in the 1970s, which now rests beneath the Carpenter’s Boat Shop sign in the middle of the campus. Bobby guides the volunteers through the construction. When a volunteer planes the wrong side of a board, Bobby is non-plussed. “You never learn anything by doing it right,” he says. “You learn by doing it wrong.”
Everyone is happy to have Bobby back on campus, and the apprentices consider themselves fortunate to spend time with him, but he doesn’t like the focus to be on him. It’s not his way. He wants the focus to be on Witham.
Witham now lives in the director’s house that the Boat Shop purchased in 2011 and where Bobby lived with his second wife for the last six months of his directorship. She shares the house with her partner Annie and their dog, Hobie, a 6-year-old terrier-whippet mix who joins Witham at the campus every day. She spends her days running the shop much as Bobby did at the end of his tenure, managing the budget, raising funds, expanding the shop’s reach and giving the apprentices and volunteers the opportunity to acquire the skills to build beautiful and reliable vessels.
“My entire career has led me here,” she says. “So much of what I’m passionate about is right here under this roof called the Carpenter’s Boat Shop.”
This article was originally published in the July 2023 issue.
